


i hope that you would do this for me

by orphan_account



Series: at the bottom [1]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:18:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2720114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They leave together, fading into the night, the name of some destination like wine on their tongues: a temporary solution to a permanent problem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i hope that you would do this for me

Lately, Michael hates when Geoff builds the dreams.

Right now he's at the bar in a grand hall that's lit with chandeliers that drip with diamonds. The wallpaper on the walls is ornate and gilded with gold. Fake or not, it's all too much. It's garish. Geoff overdoes things now. He's given an inch and he takes a mile, drives down it with reckless abandon in the nicest car he can find. Michael will give him that—he has nice taste in cars.

And then there's his attention to detail. Tonight, it's a black tie event and no one has deviated from that. It's perfectionism taken to its absolute extreme. Geoff has forgotten the idea of subtleties, of a bumbling husband here or there who forgot about the dress code and is now being stabbed with daggers from the eyes of his furious wife.

Geoff has forgotten that dealing with absolutes makes things too seamless, makes them less real. And perhaps that's all fine and good in his own dreams, but when they're dealing with a mark, there are different things to consider, and Geoff knows that.

Maybe it’s quick and easy to make everyone have black ties, but the mark is going to expect a break in uniformity. For fuck's sake.

He pops an olive into his mouth and grimaces—it tastes like it's doused in whiskey. _Everything_ in Geoff's dreams tastes like it's been doused in whiskey. Granted, it’s good whiskey, but that doesn’t make it any more fitting than if it wasn’t. If anything it just reminds Michael of things that should be off his mind when he’s on the clock.

Another thing Michael hates is waiting, but that's about all he has to do on this job. Just wait, wait, wait until the right moment, until the world rumbles with the sound of music from somewhere up above.

For right now, there's just quiet chatter. Michael doesn't much like listening to what projections talk about. The whole idea has always made him more than a little uncomfortable. Sometimes he catches the tail end of things, a word or a sentence fragment, but nothing more. Really, he doesn't like them at all.

But there's one projection sitting at a table across the aisle from the bar, a petite brunette with soft blue eyes and a glossy edge to her that sets her apart from everyone else. She catches Michael’s eye and he's unable to look away.

And that's strange. Projections don't usually look at you, unless it's eerily and in union, or angrily while they pass you in the street. No, if the mind hasn't perceived a threat, Michael has found, he's as good as invisible unless he makes an effort to get someone's attention.

Except right now as he watches the petite brunette slip away and turn into a young man with sandy brown hair, a ridiculous nose, and lips that quirk up at him, that make something hot uncoil inside of him, that aren't, altogether, unfamiliar.

 _Fuck_. Michael turns around.

It's not, logistically speaking, a good idea to get involved with projections. Much less, projections of people that you know topside, that you wish weren't here right now.

But even as he leans over the bar, over his drink and the bowl of olives, Michael is still thinking, _Fuck, why did it have to be him?_

Worst of all, he's not even surprised when the brunet sidles up to his side, hip pressed against his, eyes half-lidded as he says, "What are you drinking, hm?"

Oh, it's terrible. Michael _wants_ and, he thinks, he might be able to get it, too. This is Geoff's projection, after all, not his own. If it were his own he'd be dead by now, he's sure of it. He'd have a knife stabbed into his gut and he’d be bleeding out on the shining tiles like a stuck pig. But Geoff doesn't know everything that's gone on in the past few years, he's reasonably sure, so instead he has this.

Instead he has Gavin breathing hot against his face, an infatuated look in his eyes.

"I'm—I'm busy, right now," is what he manages to answer with. He hopes that it’s enough and is strangely sad that it probably will be. Projections don't tend to hang around for long and—there it is. The floor shakes underneath them and the table of the bar vibrates with the drawn out, deep sound of the swell of an orchestra slowed down twenty times over.

He wonders, as things begin to slip away, what he would have seen if he had looked in the projection's eyes. Would it have smelled like him—like Gavin? Or would it have been all wrong?

When he wakes up topside he wastes no time in shedding off the sticky wrong feeling of the dream like snake skin and pulling the IV out of the crook of his arm. The headphones that are blaring a song that he's never bothered to learn the name of into his ears come next—it takes a lot of self-control to not throw them across the room.

The sleeves of his shirt are already rolled up his forearms and his glasses are on the cheap nightstand next to the bed he was lying in, everything in perfect order.

Geoff is slumped over in a chair in the corner of the room and for a second Michael is sure he didn’t get the kick and he’s still in there. It wouldn’t be the first time. It took them a month to set up the logistics for this job and during that time Michael had to put his foot down. There couldn’t be a singer at the party, not a uniquely pretty blonde with tattoos up and down her arms. No, Geoff. You know why.

But when he approaches him he finds that Geoff is just stirring slowly and he breathes out a sigh of relief that would be embarrassing if it weren’t warranted.

“Hey,” he says, worrying at the clasp of his watch, “how’d it go?”

Geoff shrugs and Michael’s stomach feels emptier than it has any right to. They’ve worked enough jobs together now that he knows what that means. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t a success, either.

“We should leave before he wakes up,” Michael offers, like it’s something he needs to say and not just him trying to fill the air between them with the obvious.

 _He_ is a sleeping corporate exec who’s eyelids are currently fluttering. Michael escorted him up to his hotel room last night after a carefully non-descript conversation at the bar that had been orchestrated beforehand to make the mark drink far more than he should. Discussion of your two ex-wifes will do that to you.

Michael figures it isn’t the end of the world if they didn’t get the bank account numbers they were supposed to from the recesses of his mind. They’ve botched jobs before, they’re no strangers to disappearing for a good, long while. But, still.

He’s starting to hold it against Geoff, the situation they’re in. The kinds of jobs they have to take. It’s starting to fester inside of him, and he’s having a harder time letting things go. Because it’s been a while now. Time has passed. The wound isn’t fresh like it once was, so Michael’s having difficulty sympathizing when Geoff presses salt to it.

They leave together, fading into the night, the name of some destination like wine on their tongues: a temporary solution to a permanent problem.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Michael met Gavin six years ago, now, on a job in Luxembourg.

He’d worked with Geoff and Griffon before, both enjoyed and begrudged their easy relationship, the way they would look at each other and touch each other—with a casual amount of passion that never seemed to diminish, even in the company of others.

At the time, he was the only weapons expert with professional experience in the game. The dreamsharing pool was small back then, and it wasn't hard to at least know of everyone in the same line of work.

But Michael had never heard of Gavin Free, and he felt that he would have if he was noteworthy: a ridiculously accented, easily excitable forger with a gift for pushing everyone’s buttons? Michael had no doubt, an hour into meeting him that Gavin was a new find, someone else Geoff had lifted from the ashes of some spectacular fire.

This knowledge quelled Michael’s irritability for the first day and a half, until Gavin dropped a PASIV system with an almost giddy, “Oops!” As if his stupidity was some happy circumstance, an event he was seeing playing out in a television show, without any real consequences.

Michael blew up, screamed, asked Gavin if he had _any_ idea how much that kind of technology cost.

Gavin had shrunk down, looked surprised, obviously hadn’t expected Michael’s temper. He’d get used to it over time, the more jobs they worked together—but the first time quieted him and they didn’t talk until later that night, when Michael was hunched over his laptop and Geoff and Griffon were under, working on the temperature and natural progress of time in the build.

“Hey, um,” Gavin had said, one hand on the desk, like that was the only part of himself he felt safe putting close to Michael. “You know, I am taking this seriously. I don’t want you to think I’m not. I just—you were right, I didn’t know how much that thing was worth. I’m new to all of this, but I’m trying to learn. I mean that.”

Michael kept his eyes on the file open in front of him, even though he was nearly going cross-eyed from staring at it for so long. He made a sort of assenting grunt, a noncommittal acceptance of what was being said.

Somehow, Gavin had taken that as invitation to lean himself fully against the desk. “So. It’s just, I owe a lot to them, Geoff and—”

“Yeah, I can figure out who you mean,” Michael had said, leaning back in his chair, taking in the sight of Gavin: messy hair, sweat-stained shirt, schooled expression of nonchalance, and eyes that gave him away, showed the fact that he was actually worried.

“Look—I don’t want to, uh, start this off the wrong way? They want me to work with them a lot. So, it’s. It’s likely that means I’ll work with _you_ a lot, and. I don’t want that to be something we both dread.”

Michael had nodded, said okay, sure, it’s fine. Really, Gavin. _Really_.

The rest of the job had gone smooth as glass: a butterfly garden in the mind of an old woman who was willing to waste away her fortune to spend hours alone there, to have a monarch butterfly land on her outstretched hand. Back then, jobs had been more poetic, they'd been able to be more selective.

In the dream, Gavin had been the only person allowed to interact with her, under the guise of a conservationist. And Michael had known, then, that he meant it, that he was taking this seriously. He knew from the way that Gavin had listed the genus and species name of every butterfly that flew past them, the way he’d held onto the arm of the old woman as he guided her around, from the way he smiled cockily at Michael when they woke up, topside.

They’d fucked a month later, in Krakow, a halfway point between two separate jobs they’d been working.

Gavin had texted Michael every day, mundane facts about his life, pictures of Geoff laughing, glimpses into what, Michael supposed, he was missing out on.

But Michael didn’t work with teams then, he didn’t do tight-knit, even if he did text Gavin back to tell him he was an idiot, he was stupid and, one night when he was drunk, that what he really was, was in need of a good fuck.

Gavin had agreed and, so: Krakow, Michael meaning to make Gavin beg for it and doing nothing of the sort, eating eggs benedict in bed, visiting a museum full of stained glass.

It’d been good, for a while, until everything fell apart.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Geoff takes a job in Incheon that Michael doesn’t agree to and that’s the last straw.

Michael throws things, breaks things, and Geoff drinks whiskey on the hotel room couch, looking none-the-worse for the wear.

“You know this is your fault, don’t you?” Michael asks, when he’s calmed down enough to form full sentence. His voice is hoarse and he still wants to wring Geoff’s neck but he’s able to be rational now, at least in short bursts.

Geoff’s answer is to top himself off, drop the empty bottle on the ground and open the door to the balcony, slam it shut behind him as the bottle rolls unceremoniously under the couch.

Michael cleans everything up, just like always. He pays for the hotel room with his newest fake credit card, and calls Lindsay in the lobby.

“I can’t fucking do this anymore,” he says, trying to keep his voice low. Most of the people around him can’t speak English, but he doesn’t feel like risking the off chance that someone will pick up on what he’s saying so he ducks through a door that he assumes is marked for staff only and stands at the bottom of a stairwell.

“Where are you right now?” Lindsay is calm and pragmatic, a voice of reason. Not for the first time, Michael thinks of how lucky he is that he met her, working on a close to home job in Dallas four years ago.

“Belarus.” Michael tries to remember the time stamp on the tickets Geoff had sitting on the bed. “We’re supposed to leave for Incheon at four in the morning. Christ. Fuck. He didn’t even ask me—he just thinks he can drag me wherever he wants to and you know what the worst part is?”

“Hm?”

“He _can_. I’m going to go with him. What else can I do?”

“Turn down the job?” Lindsay offers. “Call and tell them there was a conflict of interests. Make him take a break for a while.”

“We’re almost out of money, that would be—I can only commit fraud so many fucking times.”

“Then I’ll—”

“No, you won’t. I won’t let you. I just hate this. I hate the fucking situation I’m in. I wish I’d stayed with you. I fucked everything up.”

“Well,” she says, and then she doesn’t say anything else for a minute that stretches on for longer than it rightly should. He’s ready to do anything, to break down maybe, when she finally clears her throat. “I think that you have to stop thinking about us. We had a good thing, and I like talking to you. I’ll always help you, but.”

“But I’m a fuck up,” he says shortly. “You deserve better than a fuck up.”

“You said it, not me.” He can see her smiling in his head and it makes him homesick. “Now, come on. If you have a job to do, go do it. Don’t back down. Do what you have to and don’t call me again with this self-pity bullshit. You deserve better than that.”

He’s on a flight to Incheon at four in the morning, Geoff asleep next to him, the world tens of thousands of feet below him and his problems tens of thousands of feet above.

 

 

* * *

 

  
It was Griffon’s idea to go deeper into dreams, for longer.

She had the type of dreams that made you want that, dreams just as dangerous and as beautiful as her. Everything she built was vivid and luscious, like the taste of cotton candy melting on your tongue.

Michael never wanted to leave the dreams she built so, in a way, he understood why no one objected to her idea to double the dosage of Somnacin when they went under.

But Michael had always trusted Ray’s opinion as a chemist and, more than that, he’d never known Ray to discourage someone from taking a risk before. So when Ray had balked at the idea, gone quiet on the phone and then said he didn’t know, he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t say that it was a very good idea, Michael had dropped out.

He’d fucked off to St. Petersburg, then Capetown, then Boston, spent a month working with a team of grad students at MIT who barely slept and were surprisingly lenient with the law when it came to getting results for their research.

He’d gotten the call one morning, Gavin a blubbering mess, the way he never was, and Michael had landed at LAX that night and knocked on the door to Gavin’s apartment at one in the morning.

Gavin had opened the door, his eyes red rimmed and his mouth set in a firm line and he’d broken the news.

Griffon was dead, Geoff was a suspect, and they’d be flying to Shanghai in two hours. Geoff was already on his way there and all of it sounded unreal to Michael, impossible. It didn’t really hit him that any of it was happening until he was boarding his second flight in twenty-four hours with Gavin at his side.

Shanghai was loud and confusing, not as smog-filled as Michael had been led to believe.

They’d stayed there for a week and a half, hedging their bets. Michael wasn’t sure why he was there. Geoff was already slipping into a state of drunkeness that would turn out to be constant in the years to come and Gavin was desperately trying to figure out some way everything could be fixed.

But short of getting the FBI to leak the existence of dreamsharing to the public, it was hard to find some way to explain what had happened to anyone outside of those who were involved in their work.

Griffon had gone too deep, had been unable to distinguish reality from a dream, had taken a leap from a window, and to anyone else it would easily look as though Geoff had pushed her and watched her fall to her death.

The best defense they could think of was that Geoff loved her, but when there were stories of mothers drowning their children because of their love for them it was hard to see that standing up in a court of law.

So they moved from city to city, across country borders, never staying anywhere for too long. Geoff’s accounts had been frozen and Gavin’s were soon after. Michael had felt responsible and had drained his bank account, spent all his money over the course of three months, at which point they found themselves trapped in Cairo, with insufficient funds and no means of transportation.

As a last ditch effort, Michael had called Ray on a pay phone and by some stroke of luck Ray had been in Istanbul and while he hadn’t had money to offer, he did have a job.

So they’d taken it, a small time heist with political motivations and suddenly they were on the illegal side of dreamsharing and Michael had known, then, that there was no going back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Incheon is huge and sprawling, a landscape of effortlessly rising glass skyscrapers and well-dressed millennials ignoring everyone around them as they hurry to their next appointment.

Michael feels abysmally out of place, well-groomed but not stylish enough to blend in with the crowds.

Geoff is, for once, sober, if only because Korean is one of the few languages he hasn’t managed to master the basics of.

And when they make it to the rented out loftspace that they’re going to be working in, they find Gavin looking well-fed, nervous, and, by Michael’s estimates, far too pleased.

He says hello to both of them, but only really looks Geoff in the eye and Michael knows, instantly, what is happening. Geoff took this job because Gavin got in contact with him, Geoff is leaving Michael in the dust, and, really, this isn’t a job at all.

“Fuck you,” he says, for lack of anything better. It’s not eloquent or biting, but at least Gavin flinches when he says it. “Both of you, I mean it. Good luck working a job without me from now on. Good fucking luck finding anyone who will work with you that has the combat experience I do.”

“Michael,” Gavin says, but Michael is already leaving, can’t breathe even in the wide open space, can’t look at the two of them any longer.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Michael got drunk one night in São Paulo and let Gavin suck his dick, was far enough gone to tell Gavin how good he looked like that and to kiss him afterwards, to fall asleep in the same bed with him.

The next morning Gavin was gone and suddenly Michael was Geoff’s babysitter, helping him from place to place, keeping him away from sharp objects, making sure he didn’t self-destruct.

All the while he felt dirty, disgusting, used. It’s not like he thought Gavin loved him or anything. They fucked twice, they got each other off a handful of times. Neither of them had ever suggested they be exclusive, the subject had never come up and Michael certainly hadn’t been faithful. They never went out for dinner, they never woke up next to each other, they’d never even kissed until the night before.

He’d called Lindsay from one of the burner phones they had on hand and had spilled everything to her, forgetting to be scared that her phone was tapped. He’d told her not just that he’d fucked around with a guy before and after he’d been with her, but also that he was on the run, that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to come home again.

She hadn’t cared so much about the first thing, but had been understandably freaked out by the second bit of news.

Still, she was Lindsay, and by the end of the phone call she’d told him she had a contact in Lima who was looking for someone like him to do crowd control in a job for a high ranking military official. Government secrets, very confidential, everything was to be kept off the books, including the names of whoever did the work.

It was a good job, it was a cushy job, it was the kind of job you didn’t come by when you were constantly on the move and not in contact with people who had connections anymore.

Michael worked it alone, had Geoff sit in a hotel room while he was gone and called him every other hour to make sure he was still breathing.

He made off with a good chunk of money and he told Geoff they were starting over. No more wallowing, no more drinking on the job, no more major fuck ups. They were in this together, from now on, so they’d better get their shit together.

Geoff had agreed and for a year straight they’d worked jobs like clockwork. Mistakes were still made, it was the nature of dreamsharing, but nothing earth-shattering happened. They lived from job to job and things weren’t perfect, but Michael thought they were about as good as could be expected.

Until Incheon.

 

 

* * *

 

 

  
Gavin slides into the seat across from him in the Korean barbeque place he’s been sitting in for the past two hours.

“So,” he says, “do you like it?” He nods to the half-touched, cold meat on the plate in front of Michael.

“Yeah, it’s fucking great, thank God I was dragged here against my will only to find out I’m being abandoned.”

“Oh don’t be so dramatic, Michael. It’s not as if you’re Caesar and Geoff and I have conspired to stab you in the back.”

“How do you even _know_  that?” Michael asks, irrationally angry at Gavin’s happenstance intelligence. “What are you, like, studying history now or something?”

“Griffon used to—never mind. Look, we aren’t trying to push you out. It’s just that Geoff knew if he told you I was here, that you would never come.”

“Shocking.” Michael’s voice is dry, the chatter of the people around them is irritating. He feels like any minute he’s going to snap and set the whole place on fire. “It’s almost like it was a bad idea for him to lie to me and bring me here anyway, for the exact reasons I wouldn’t have wanted to come if I knew what was going on.”

Gavin sighs, like Michael is being petulant, childish. Like this isn’t something incredibly important, like their situation isn’t one fuck up away from crashing down to the ground: a house of cards swaying in the wind.

“If this is about— _you know_ , then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“No, Gavin, this is not about your dick. Most things, in fact, are not about your dick. This is about the fucking—” Michael leans in close, across the table, hissing now. “This is about the fact that I’m a fucking fugitive now thanks to the amazing Geoff Ramsey. This is about how much fucking credit card fraud I’ve had to commit to keep us afloat. And, yes, this is about you leaving for no good reason, but it is not about the grand total of two times that we fucked.”

“Well.” Gavin looks put out, that puppy dog look in his eyes that used to make Michael cave and relent, but not anymore. “I can understand that. So. But, we aren’t trying to—you can work with us if you want. We would like that.”

Michael stands up, swaying, feeling like he’s going to puke and unsure as to why.

“I’ll see you around,” he says, meaning for it to sound sarcastic. But it sounds pathetically genuine and hopeful.

He throws up in the bathroom and feels better afterwards.

He has some calls to make.

**Author's Note:**

> i always intended for this to just be an account i bookmarked things on on, hence the username (i'm just a ghost!!!) but here i am actually posting something in this fandom. well, hi! feedback is always appreciated. this is also (tentatively) a series, of which this is sort of a prequel to a longer work i have planned in my head, where other people get involved (ray! ryan! ray and ryan!) but we'll see if i ever write that...thank you for reading this if you did!


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